Syria Peace Talks In Disarray

Syrian and international delegates arrived in Switzerland on Tuesday for peace talks.

Opponents of President Bashar al-Assad, pressured to attend Wednesday's first direct negotiations by their Western backers, cited new, photographic evidence of widespread torture and killing by Syria's government in renewing their demand that Assad must quit and face an international war crimes trial.

War crimes lawyers said a vast, smuggled cache of images from a Syrian military police photographer gave clear evidence of systematic abuse and murder of about 11,000 detainees. 

The delegation from Damascus, led by Assad's foreign minister, was briefly held up at Athens due to an argument over whether EU trade sanctions permitted refueling of the plane. Assad has insisted he may be re-elected later this year and says the talks should focus on fighting "terrorism" - his term for his enemies.

The United Nations, along with co-sponsors Russia and the United States, may at least be relieved if and when the two sides sit down at the Montreux Palace hotel on Lake Geneva. A day of diplomatic chaos on Monday had threatened to scupper the event, after U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon gave a last-minute invitation to Iran, Assad's main foreign supporter.

The invitation was withdrawn after a boycott threat from the opposition, Western pressure and Iran's insistence it had never agreed to the condition Ban set for attendance - that it endorse a previous peace conference, at Geneva in 2012, which called for Assad to make way for a transitional administration.

Narrowing the gap between the warring parties seems a tall order and diplomats at the United Nations stress the meeting at Montreux on Wednesday, to be followed possibly by further talks in Geneva from Friday, is only a beginning. It could produce some deals to ease civilian suffering and exchange prisoners.

Not only are both sides still committed to a fight on the frontlines, where victory continues to elude either party, but most of the myriad rebel groups have disowned the National Coalition opposition group for agreeing to talk at all.

And while the United Nations mediator, Lakhdar Brahimi, notionally has the consensus support of world powers, the uproar over the invitation to Tehran illustrated how the war has divided Western powers from Russia and set the Sunni Arab states which back the rebels against Shi'ite Iran.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Barack Obama had a "businesslike and constructive" conversation about Syria by telephone, the Kremlin said. Their foreign ministers, Sergei Lavrov and John Kerry, were to meet later in Montreux.